Advance notice of Nottingham Poetry Festival. Readings by well known poets, poetry in pubs, poetry in performance. Bookfair.

Full programme to follow

Join us for a belated 80th birthday celebration for local writer John Harvey (well, he lives in London now, but still comes back for Notts County matches!). John is best known for his crime fiction, but is also a poet with several collections to his name, and he used to edit the little magazine Slow Dancer and Slow Dancer Press.

He will be reading with projections of photographs by Molly Ernestine Boiling, which also feature in the book.

His new collection, Aslant, will be published by Nottingham’s Shoestring Press

Stuart Henson’s new collection is also from Shoestring, featuring 46 new poems and selections from his first six books.  He will be reading the best of the best…. Here’s a review of the book in London Grip: londongrip.co.uk/2018/12/london-grip-poetry-review-stuart-henson/

Free, refreshments provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

The Living Mountain is a classic of nature writing, about the Cairgorms in Scotland. Originally written during WWII, the book lay untouched for more than thirty years before being published.

Our book group is open so that people can attend once in a lifetime, every month or when the fancy takes them. All we ask is that you read the book in advance.

You can source the book wherever you like, but in the lead up to the book group we offer 15% discount to anyone buying it, whether they plan to come to the discussion or not!

Free, refreshments included. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Alan Baker, Sue Dymoke and Aly Stoneman read poems about near and far-flung places and talk about the place of place in their poetry.

Alan Baker is the editor of Leafe Press. His latest collections are Letters from the Underworld (Red Ceilings) and Riverrun (KFS), a sequence of poems about the River Trent.

Sue Dymoke’s third full collection What They Left Behind was published by Shoestring Press in 2018.

Aly Stoneman is currently writing about sea-level rise and erosion on the British coast. She is a PhD researcher at Nottingham Trent University, sponsored by the AHRC and Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

Tickets on the door: £3 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

A Nottingham Poetry Festival event

Our first event for Feminist Book Fortnight. Join us in celebrating the publication of this crowd-funded anthology, edited by Kit de Waal.

Common People brings together thirty-three established and emerging writers who invite you to experience the world through their eyes, their voices loud and clear as they reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class.  Common People is a collection of essays, poems and memoir written in celebration, not apology: these are narratives rich in barbed humour, reflecting the depth and texture of working-class life, the joy and sorrow, the solidarity and the differences.

We will be joined here at Five Leaves by two contributors to the book:

Anita Sethi is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster who has written for the Guardian,Observer, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent, Independent on Sunday, New Statesman, Granta ,(She has also been birdwatching with Margaret Atwood!).

Jodie Russian-Red. Jodie is a Hull-born writer, poet, artist and part-time office administrator based in Nottingham. She has presented numerous spoken word shows and In 2018 she was selected to be part of Penguin Random House’s under-represented writers programme.  Jodie is appearing with the support of Writing East Midlands.

There will be readings from the book as well as a discussion of the use of crowdfunding as a way of getting diverse books published.

Tickets: £3.00 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Feminist Book Fortnight is a Five Leaves initiative, launched in 2018, when fifty independent bookshops and other organisations set up talks, discussions, book launches, poetry readings and socials to celebrate feminist writing. from all over Britain and Ireland.  Shops have already committed to taking part in 2019, as have the four women’s libraries in Britain.  One shop is in Italy!  More are signing up all the time.

Organisation is decentralised, with Five Leaves providing a website, social media, press support and print.

Feminist Book Fortnight is supported by the Booksellers Association

Please contact bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk if you are an independent bookshop, a literature promoter, library or any other organisation wishing to take part.

Our events: See 16th May event.  More to come!

Books about being active in the outdoors have been largely dominated by male writing.  We are delighted to celebrate the publication of Waymaking,  published by Vertebrate Publishing and edited by Helen Mort, Claire Carter, Heather Dawe and Camilla Barnard.  For this event we are delighted to welcome:

Camilla Barnard editor at VP Publishing and artist

Ruth Wiggins  poet, blogger (Mudpath,)  hiker

Genevieve Carver  poet and surfer and musician

This book is an anthology of prose, poetry and artwork by women who are inspired by wild places, adventure and landscape.

Published in 1961, Gwen Moffat’s Space Below My Feet tells the story of a woman who shirked the conventions of society and chose to live a life in the mountains. Some years later in 1977, Nan Shepherd published The Living Mountain, her prose bringing each contour of the Cairngorm mountains to life. These pioneering women set a precedent for a way of writing about wilderness that isn’t about conquering landscapes, reaching higher, harder or faster, but instead about living and breathing alongside them, becoming part of a larger adventure.  The artists in this inspired collection continue Gwen and Nan’s legacies, redressing the balance of gender in outdoor adventure literature.

Tickets on the door, £3.00, includes refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Venue: Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

PRESENTED BY FIVE LEAVES BOOKSHOP IN ASSOCIATION WITH BROADWAY CINEMA

Venue: Broadway Cinema, Nottingham

A special screening for Feminist Book Fortnight.

A decade in the making, this film explores the remarkable life and legacy of the late feminist author Ursula K Le Guin.

Screening as part of Feminist Book Fortnight, the film tells the remarkable life story of writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 88. Le Guin’s books defy gender norms, societal expectations and patriarchal gate keeping. A defiantly independent writer known for her science fiction and fantasy novels from the 1960s such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness. The screening will be introduced by Jane A. Adams, a crime writer who also acts as a literary mentor and Royal literary Fund Fellow. And Kathleen Bell who is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at De Montfort University, Leicester and has published both poetry and fiction. Both are long-term fans of Ursula K Le Guin’s work.

Director: Arwen Curry  Country: US  Year: 201 Duration: 68m  Normal prices apply. Booking through Broadway.

A Feminist Book Fortnight event

‘All too often the achievements of working class women have been excluded from the history books.  Yet it was these women who often fought the hardest and had the most to lose.  It is up to us to bring to life the hidden history of working class women and their great achievements.  Nan  Sloane takes up that challenge.  She unearths the stories of women who, long before the campaign for women’s suffrage, fought for workers’ rights and played a key role in the birth of the Labour Party.’  Dawn Butler MP

Come and join us for a talk by Nan Sloane followed by a discussion.  Nan is a writer and activist with extensive experience of politics, feminism and the Labour Party.  As the Director of the Centre for Women and Democracy she campaigned to increase women’s participation in both civil society and politics.  She has worked with women political activists in the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa as well as in the UK.

The Women in the Room: Labour’s Forgotten History is published by I B Tauris.

Tickets: £3 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Today sees the rise of nationalism, the return of totalitarian parties in Europe to electoral success, and the rise of the alt-right and white supremacists in the US. Thus, there is urgency for psychoanalysts, with their understanding of cruelty, sadomasochism, perversion, and other mental mechanisms, to speak out.

Dark Times starts with a look at European history in terms of monuments and mourning, before moving into storytelling and the elision of thought and history at this current time, including the brutalities inflicted by ISIS on the Yazidi, and concludes with a meditation on the relationship between cruelty in the early environment and hatred of the other within society, with particular focus on racism in the US.

Tickets: £5, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

“We are pleased to announce that internationally acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane will give our third annual lecture in association with the University of Nottingham, at the Council House Ballroom in Nottingham on the 22nd May.

“The annual UNESCO lecture aims to provide a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share their ideas and promote Nottingham city’s wide-ranging expertise on international literature, literacy and the wider creative economy.

“Robert is renowned for his writing on landscape, memory, place and nature. His books have been widely adapted for film, television and radio, and he has collaborated with many artists, photographers and musicians. Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, perhaps the most eagerly anticipated non-fiction book of 2019, takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet’s past and future, and into darkness and its meanings. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, it is both an ancient and an urgent work.

“Follow the conversation on Twitter using #UNESCOlecture and @nottmcityoflit

“If you have any enquiries, please contact Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature via email: contactus@nottmcityoflit.org”

This event  can only be booked through Eventbrite. It is currently sold out – add your name the waiting list here – www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unesco-lecture-2019-with-robert-macfarlane-tickets-56566678458

Join us for the launch of the two new New Walk Editions pamphlets: Linda Zisquit, From the Notebooks of Korah’s Daughter, and Declan Ryan, A Blues Song for Fighters.

Linda Zisquit has published five collections, most recently Return from Elsewhere and Havoc: New & Selected Poems. Her translations from Hebrew include Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach and These Mountains: Selected Poems of Rivka Miriam. For many years she has been Poetry Coordinator and Associate Professor in the Bar Ilan MA in Creative Writing Program. Born in Buffalo, NY, she lives in Jerusalem, Israel where she founded and runs Artspace Gallery.

Declan Ryan was born in County Mayo, Ireland, and has lived mainly in London. His previous pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. His work has appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry (US), Poetry Ireland and the New Statesman, among others.

Free, refreshments provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

A Nottingham Poetry Society event, in association with Happenstance Press – publisher of D.A. Prince and Maria Taylor

D.A. Prince has written two full collections for Happenstance, but her latest with them is a pamphlet where she considers ephemera —rail tickets, a supermarket till receipt, an old postcard, a scribbled note found in a second-hand purchase. You may have a pile of your own half-read books, threatening to topple and expose their markers. What secrets will they spill?

Maria Taylor’s first collection, Melanchrini (Nine Arches), was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Since 2015, she has been Reviews Editor for Under the Radar, and she blogs at Commonplace.

‘Commonplace’, however, is precisely what she is not. There’s no telling what she’ll do from one poem to the next, which is only one of the things that makes this pamphlet such a delight. As she said herself in a Poetry Spotlight interview: ‘A successful collection is a little world in itself.’ And so it is

£3 on the door, refreshments included. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Five Leaves is pleased to be a partner in this conference, with stalls and events.

Full details to follow

www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/clas/transnational-radical-film-cultures/index.aspx

Clive Myer was the director of the International Film School Wales and the Film Academy at the University of Glamorgan. He is an independent filmmaker.

In this talk Clive Myer will be purging the obstructive line between the making of and the theorising on film, uniting theory and practice in order to move beyond the commercial confines of Hollywood. He will be drawing on the ideas of writers such as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and flimmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis.

The discussion will be of interest to students, academics, and independent filmmakers as well as for anyone interested in new perspectives on culture and film.

Free event, with refreshments provided.

Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

This event forms part of…

Federico García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898  and was executed on 19 August 1936 by nationalist forces in Franco’s Spain early in the Spanish Civil War. He was a poet, playwright,  theatre director and gay. His body has never been found.

He achieved international recognition as a member of the “Generation of 27”, a group of mostly poets who introduced European styles like symbolism, futurism and surrealism into Spanish theatre. His best known work includes Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernalda Alba.

This talk – on Lorca’s birthday – will include short readings from his poetry and plays, and cover his life and work.

Stephen Roberts is Associate Professor and Reader in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and Head of Department, Faculty of Arts

Tickets: £3.00 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Insiders/Outsiders is a UK-wide arts festival which runs throughout 2019 and which examines the extraordinarily rich and pervasive contribution of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe to the visual culture, art education and art-world structures of the United Kingdom. In every field, émigrés arriving from Europe in the 1930s – supported by a small number of like-minded individuals already resident in the UK – introduced a professionalism, internationalism and bold avant-gardism to a British art world not known for these attributes.

At a time when the issue of immigration is much debated, this illustrated talk serves as a reminder of the importance of cultural cross-fertilization and of the deep, long-lasting and wide-ranging contribution that refugees make to British life.

Monica Bohm-Duchen is the creative director of the www.insidersoutsidersfestival.org and is an art historian.

Tickets: £3 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Five Leaves Bookshop is organising several events in Nottingham as part of the festival. Contact us for more information.

Leading up to Nottingham Refugee Week….

Lyndsey Stonebridge will present a  highly topical and timely account of refugee history and literatature, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, and Simone Weil.

She has written the first literary history of modern statelessness that raises vital questions about sovereignty, humanism, and the future of human rights which highlights the importance of modern literature in understanding the challenges of today’s refugee ‘crisis’.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham.

Chaired by Karen Adler, University of Nottingham Department of History

Tickets: £3.00 on the door, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

In his first book, leading political commentator Aaron Bastani, from Novara Media, conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we might move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone. And it’s a great book title.  In association with Verso Books.

Tickets: £3.00 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk